Some of these became instant cult classics and some were smaller films championed by few at the time, and have only recently - and belatedly - been rediscovered as true treasures. Some dominated the box office for weeks on end. So it wasn’t that hard, after many Zima-fueled nights of popping VHS tapes in and out of our video cassette recorders, to come up with a definitive ranked list of the 100 greatest movies of the 1980s. It’s never quite been the lost decade that people have claimed it was. Documentaries became formally innovative, socially insightful and more popular than ever. Several major directors brought their A game to the 1980s, a transfusion of fresh-blood filmmakers hit the scene with breakthrough works and bold debuts, and a handful of veteran international auteurs made late masterpieces. Genres like science fiction and horror hit new heights. But that 10-year period minted a handful of Hall of Fame movie stars. It was a lull, a pressed pause button, a clearing of the throat in between arias. For a long time, the Eighties were considered a bit of a cinematic dead zone stuck between the New Hollywood/modern blockbuster-inventing Seventies and the edgier, irony-heavy Indie Revolution Nineties. (Thank you for three of those things.) And if you went to the movies regularly, you were blessed with a steady diet of horny teens, killer robots, homesick extraterrestrials, raging bulls, road warriors, cop-and-crook team-ups, and more dystopian visions of the future than you could shake a time-traveling DeLorean at. I guess what I wanted was D having to think very critically about solving his problems instead of immediately knowing the answers or just brute forcing his way through.It was the decade that gave us the Reagan administration, Rubik’s cubes, “The Reflex” and Run DMC. What ends up playing out is some kind of DBZ knock-off (or inspiration?) where the situation is instantaneously resolved by lobbing off a head, an arm, or any other sliceable body part. This film takes the lazy route concluding these scenarios by conveniently having him have some kind of flash of brilliance that relieves tension a little too quickly. They try their best to make D one super badass mofo while also going to great lengths to show that he sometimes has difficulty surmounting his problems. I’m also a fanboy of Yoshitaka Amano, the character designer for D, and have no real complaints regarding that aspect. It meshes well with this style of animation. A lot of the movie is spent exploring this world and describing through some pretty nice visuals how things work in this distant apocalyptic future. He is given the task of killing a super old, super powerful vampire MegaBoss for a girl in a village who was bitten recently and doesn’t want to be a totally awesome vampire noble. This is a movie about D, a half-human, half-vampire hybrid warrior with an extra face on his hand. People who are ‘bitten’ are ostracized from society unless they join the ranks of the vampire noble elite through marriage or servitude… or both. In this fairly well-realized world we see vampires, werewolves, and mutants terrorize neo-Victorian villages regularly. Vampire Hunter D is a Japanimation (anime) film set in the super-distant future, where the world is or isn’t sometimes a wasteland and motion is reduced to about 10 frames per second.
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